Online storefronts often provide reviews about items that are offered for sale. One problem with online reviews is that most of them are written by strangers with whom a potential purchaser has no trust relationship. Reviews written by people known to a potential purchaser are likely to have more influence upon that person's decision-making than those by people who they do not know or trust. The advent of widespread online social networks and online shopping creates opportunities for online shoppers to seek input online from persons who they trust about items such as songs, videos, games and books before deciding whether to make a purchase.
Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce in which a consumer acquires goods or services from a seller over the internet. An online storefront often is implemented using an application that runs on a user device to provide a user interface (UI) that provides an online storefront experience and that communicates with a web server. The web server provides information for display by the user device, which allows a user to browse through the store and to download or purchase items.
A server is a computer or program configured to supply data or resources to other machines on a network. The basic architecture of the internet is relatively simple: web clients running on users' machines, e.g., mobile devices use HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol) to request objects from web servers. The server processes the request and sends a response back to the client. HTTP is built on a client-server model in which a client makes a request of the server. A web server often is implemented using multiple physical or virtual computers that work cooperatively to retrieve and deliver information used to generate display information such as web pages for display on user devices upon request.